Steve Huffman, Reddit’s co-founder and CEO, has already admitted that he fucked up last week when he decided to “troll the trolls” by editing user comments in the infamous pro-Trump subreddit, The_Donald. Today, in a long Reddit post, Huffman goes on to address the site’s growing problems with toxic communities and users.

But first, the mea culpa. Huffman acknowledges that his actions last week “[compromised] the trust [users] have in Reddit.” He shares that he spent his “formative years as a young troll on the Internet,” and says he’d hoped his “trolling” of The _Donald would help him find “common ground with that community by meeting them on their level.” It didn’t.

Perhaps realizing that trolling isn’t behavior becoming of a CEO of a well-funded business with millions of active users, Huffman has resolved to never do anything like this in the future:

While many users across the site found what I did funny, or appreciated that I was standing up to the bullies (I received plenty of support from users of r/the_donald), many others did not. I understand what I did has greater implications than my relationship with one community, and it is fair to raise the question of whether this erodes trust in Reddit. I hope our transparency around this event is an indication that we take matters of trust seriously. Reddit is no longer the little website my college roommate, u/kn0thing, and I started more than eleven years ago. It is a massive collection of communities that provides news, entertainment, and fulfillment for millions of people around the world, and I am continually humbled by what Reddit has grown into. I will never risk your trust like this again, and we are updating our internal controls to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future.

Of course, Huffman’s antics only exacerbated the problems that Reddit has grappled with over the last year. As Gizmodo highlighted yesterday, those problems—many which relate to The_Donald subreddit—threaten to tear the site and its community of users and volunteer moderators apart.

Reddit has been a toxic place for quite some time, but actions taken by members of The_Donald have taken that toxicity to the next level. While many moderators have called for banning The _Donald altogether—the subreddit’s behavior frequently violates the site’s community guidelines—Huffman has resisted that call. He’s still resisting it (with the “spirit of healing”), but he has agreed to make some changes that should lessen The_Donald’s ability to infiltrate Reddit as a whole.

Admitting that “the current situation is not sustainable,” Huffman has laid out some changes that will now take place:

Historically, we have relied on our relationship with moderators to curb bad behaviors. While some of the moderators have been helpful, this has not been wholly effective, and we are now taking a more proactive approach to policing behavior that is detrimental to Reddit:

We have identified hundreds of the most toxic users and are taking action against them, ranging from warnings to timeouts to permanent bans. Posts stickied on r/the_donald will no longer appear in r/all. r/all is not our frontpage, but is a popular listing that our most engaged users frequent, including myself. The sticky feature was designed for moderators to make announcements or highlight specific posts. It was not meant to circumvent organic voting, which r/the_donald does to slingshot posts into r/all, often in a manner that is antagonistic to the rest of the community.

We will continue taking on the most troublesome users, and going forward, if we do not see the situation improve, we will continue to take privileges from communities whose users continually cross the line—up to an outright ban.

Huffman also said that all users can now filter content from appearing from r/all, meaning you can just block content from The_Donald from ever showing up.

Aside from the “action” taken against toxic users, the biggest change is that stickied posts from The_Donald will no longer appear on r/all. Post-stickying was a tactic The_Donald users would frequently use to get posts sent to r/all, which functions essentially as Reddit’s frontpage. Mods would sticky a post to the top of the subreddit and members would upvote those posts in droves, ensuring the messages would hit r/all.

Disallowing sticky posts from The_Donald to hit r/all will make it much harder for The_Donald content to hit the front page. In Centipede Central, the Discord channel, a user admitted that “not having stickies means we have to reach the frontpage organically.”

How well Reddit’s new plans will work remain to be determined. It really does look, as one member of Centipede Central said, as if Reddit is trying to quarantine The_Donald without actually quarantining it. But don’t expect The_Donald members to acquiesce to these new changes without a fight.

Some members immediately called for brigading as a way to get around the stick post ban. Vote brigading (where users are instructed to target a specific post for upvotes) is against Reddit’s rules and the Discord channel Centipede Central is not to be used to conjure up votes. As a result, some The_Donald users in Centipede Central are trying to devise other options to ensure their message reaches r/all. Right now, some of the ideas being bantered about include creating a new Donald Trump subreddit (so that that content can then hit the front page) or trying to leak content into other subreddits to angle for upvotes.

Though Huffman is finally publicly acknowledging the problems The_Donald is causing on Reddit itself, don’t count on them disappearing any time soon.

HBO has released a handful of images from this Sunday’s Westworld Season 1 finale. The images, which you can see here at Collider, bring up a number of questions. In one shot, we see hosts Maeve, Hector, and Armistice apparently escaping alongside Westworld park technician Felix. In another shot, Dolores is standing next to her grave, while yet another shows Teddy with a pile of dead bodies behind him.

The episode is 90 minutes long and was directed by showrunner Jonathan Nolan. The chapter will answer most of your questions–but not all of them. “We weren’t interested in spinning out mysteries with no answers in sight,” Nolan said.

A third update for the PC version of Dishonored 2 is now available in beta. Like the first two, the focus is again on improving performance, which has been an issue since launch.

Update 1.3 offers “[g]eneral performance and optimization improvements,” according to the patch notes. There’s now an option to disable camera motion blur, and by default, the FPS limiter has been set to 60 FPS. Be aware that turning off v-sync twice will result in that dropping to 30. This is listed as a known issue and will presumably be fixed down the line.

Among the bugs that have been fixed are those “impacting mouse movement speed” and certain settings not reverting after selecting No when leaving the menu. Issues with running the game on multi-monitor setups and 5:4 or 4:3 aspect ratios have also allegedly been resolved.

As with previous beta updates, you’ll need to specifically opt in to download this. You can do so by right-clicking the game in your Steam library, going to Properties, then selecting BetaPatch from the Betas drop-down menu. Close the pop-up window and Steam should automatically download the update.

If you aren’t already, you should ensure you’re using the 375.95 drivers if you’re running an Nvidia card or 16.11.4 if you’re on AMD hardware. Today’s announcement mentions Nvidia drivers 375.70 & 375.86 present a problem “unique to Dishonored 2 which impacts performance.”

Recently, top YouTubers are saying that, yet again, the behemoth video sharing network is fucking them over. This time, it’s about an alleged issue with subscribers—suddenly, they’re disappearing. And, no, it’s not because they unsubscribed. YouTube, for their part, denies that there’s a glitch.

Regardless, several popular YouTubers are up in arms about shrinking subscriber counts right now. In a video yesterday, popular YouTuber h3h3Productions alleged that “YouTube is not being honest with us.” H3h3Productions shows several screenshotted tweets from fans who say they aren’t getting notified about his new videos anymore. He echoes complaints from other YouTubers that his videos were getting less views by a wide margin than usual, and that when he uploads new videos, he apparently loses subscribers. His subscriber count is shrinking for no apparent reason.

Over the last 24 hours, severalother huge names made videos alleging the same problems h3h3Productions spells out in his video, affirming that subscribers are apparently removed after YouTubers post videos. Today, YouTuber JackSepticEye posted a video in which he claims that some content creators have lost 30 to 40 percent of their usual views, without any explanation from YouTube.

“This is people’s careers,” JackSepticEye explained. “To completely switch how you do things and not tell anybody is a shitty thing to do.”

In an e-mail, YouTuber Jim Sterling told me that the issue of subscribers not getting notified is years old. “YouTube’s notification system for subscribers can be utterly awful, and as with many problems YouTube has, fixing it isn’t a priority whatsoever,” he said. But Sterling was puzzled by the subscriber loss problem, which he says he’s experienced, too. He’s noticed that, when he posts a new video, it “costs” subscribers:

“I wrote it off as me just pissing off more people than usual lately, but hey, if there’s a reason for this that isn’t my fault, I’ll take it!” he said.

Curiously, when I reached out to YouTube for an explanation, they told me that none of this was out of the ordinary. A YouTube spokesperson explained that, although YouTube has heard concerns about subscriber drops, an “extensive review” unearthed nothing unusual going on “beyond the normal fluctuations that occur when viewers unsubscribe to a channel or when we YouTube removes spam subscriptions to ensure accurate subscriber numbers.” The representative added that “YouTube never automatically unsubscribes users from channels.” They say there is no glitch.

Normal fluctuations to subscriber counts occur when, of course, viewers subscribe and unsubscribe; creators use third-party reporting tools to count subscribers; and spam subscribers are removed. Regarding notifications, YouTube by default only notifies fans about “highlights from the channel they’ve subscribed to,” the representative told me. Fans who want to receive notifications about a channel’s every upload can toggle that setting.

Now, this is a conundrum. Content creators say their subscriber counts and views are rapidly deflated while YouTube says it’s business as usual. So, to explain what’s going on, YouTubers are trading theories over Twitter and the video sharing site.

YouTubers like H3h3productions and DramaAlert believe that genuine content is slowly getting suffocated on the platform, while YouTube boosts ads on the “trending” tab, or videos with more likes and comments. The conspiracy theory is that YouTube promotes sponsored videos or bullshit giveaway videos instead of videos with merit. When asked directly by H3h3 productions, he said, YouTube explained that they were promoting videos with more “activity.”

When I asked whether YouTube has changed their promotion algorithm, the YouTube representative did not provide an answer.

The mechanisms behind YouTube’s algorithms are opaque, but YouTubers want to be kept in the loop. Exclamatory videos proclaiming the latest YouTube injustice are almost a genre of their own, filling the communication hole between YouTube and its content creators. It’s their livelihood, they say—they deserve to know what’s happening under the hood.

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Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan but people will know me as Jon... I enjoy hiking and exploring the outside world as well as getting to see fantastic views. It can bring you to the most beautiful places on earth and into contact with amazing plants and wildlife and can be done all year round which is why I enjoy it so much despite it being challenging sometimes due to the weather - it has allowed me to meet a lot of new people and experience things I wouldn't have before. I also find it relaxing and interesting.
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